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| To those who think they "Made It" in Engeneering: What was your path? |
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| PaulAm:
You're more likely to do well if you're in the founding team of a startup (or you're the lead). Of course your chances of failure are much higher than a big payoff. There's quite a bit of luck involved on whether the product you're making gets picked up by the market. (Been in 3 startups, got the T-shirt, not much else) You're unlikely to make a lot of money working for somebody else unless you can develop a rare skillset that is in high demand, and that takes years of experience and a bit (ha!, a lot) of luck in choosing the correct path to a place that doesn't currently exist. If you want to make money working for somebody, go into finance or be management in an insurance firm (the second highest paid CEO in our state was the head of a medical insurance company, he was exceeded only by the CEO of GM) You can do pretty well by identifying a niche, getting really good at it, developing a reputation and a network of contacts and working for yourself. An then be ready to do it all over again when everything changes and your niche is obsoleted. You probably won't be buying a Ferrari though. Save extensively and invest conservatively and you're be a millionaire by the time you're 40 anyway. |
| RJSV:
This is the type of post I look for, and will read first. As for Bob Widlar historically speaking: My instructor started talking about Bob Widlar and his 'CURRENT SOURCE' innovation, in an analog IC class in engineering course. "What does 'personal' mention have to do with learning analog?" I was thinking. But soon I realized, the instructor was talking about (Widlar's inventiveness and willingness to, yeah, think outside the box). What a great story to weave, in an otherwise sterile classroom setting. Essentially, Widlar reasoned that a 'current source' circuit be placed in a totally different way, as a LOAD ! That way your bigger circuit sees a huge load value, like 15 megohms, something like that. I've come to learn that 'mis-placements' of components from traditional circuit roles is a common aspect, of inventions and other novel research. Taking those ideas, I'd have to say a person like Ron Widlar was a great story, relating to success in careers. |
| james_s:
If you're in engineering to make big money then you're in it for the wrong reason and you will probably never achieve that goal. You can make a good living for sure, but you won't get rich. To do that requires a combination of dumb luck being in the right place at the right time and getting in on the ground floor of a new company that takes off big. My partner's grandfather cofounded Data-IO and retired by 40, it was a crapshoot, PROMs could have turned out to be a dead end, or a dozen companies could have produced similar programming devices and the whole thing could have fizzled but they got lucky and it took off. The uncle of a friend of mine was one of I think the first 10 employees at Valve (game company) and he's loaded. I know a couple of guys who were early employees of Microsoft and retired very well off when they were younger than I am now. All of these people got rich mostly because they were lucky. They also happened to be very competent engineers but that isn't what got them rich. Guys like Widlar were brilliant, members of a very small and elite group of people forging new territory. Most of them don't do it for the money though, they probably would have done it for free if there was no money to be had in it. For a lot of engineers it isn't so much a career path as a life calling, I could not imagine doing anything that didn't involve some form of engineering, and I knew that by the time I was a toddler. |
| tom66:
Depends what you consider 'made it'. My salary with annual bonus is in the top 10% of incomes now, for the UK. I still can't afford a home in the area I live, I still don't have the best pension fund outlooks, and I don't have fast cars and attractive women chasing me down. But I'm pretty happy with my job, I don't struggle to pay bills and it's nice to be able to put my skills to use in something I enjoy. Pretty much the top end for electronic engineering in the UK is about £100k/year, but you have to be pretty much gold dust to earn that much with an extremely niche but competitive skill set. I think the best a genuine engineer (ie not a manager or CTO or anything like that) can hope to make is around £75k/year. That would be an FPGA engineer or maybe an analog signals engineer, not just a generalist in electronics. It's about £6,250 per month pre-tax. After tax you'd have about £4,000 per month. You can do a lot with that, but you won't be buying 10GHz oscilloscopes every month. But there comes a point when more money isn't worth it -- Because life is for living and money is the lubricant to make your life easier to live, but to work just to earn money is pointless, you cannot take it with you to the grave and the prime years of your life are before you are 40, so enjoy them while you can. I have a friend who was earning £150k/year as a consultant at KPMG, who resigned his position for a pay cut by almost 60%, because he hated his job so much. |
| rstofer:
--- Quote from: TimNJ on June 24, 2021, 04:13:10 pm --- You can live very comfortably with salaries >$100K/year, but I think even gray beard EE's are probably not (on average) making too much more than $120-130K/year, and lots of young and middle-age engineers working for $60-90K/year. --- End quote --- You can't live comfortably in Silicon Valley on that kind of salary. Maybe a couple of such incomes could get by... https://sf.curbed.com/2018/3/2/17073100/silicon-valley-house-home-sunnyvale-record-price-crisis You can go to bls.gov and check median incomes by occupation and location. Growth is not favorable for EEs, CS types make more money and the field is growing faster by a LOT. The problem I have with bls.gov is that they seem to comingle electrical engineering (power and such) with electronics engineering. |
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